How many here tried tools like Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf, Replit, Bolt etc in the last month?

Tried using MCPs with above?

Keeping track of improvements in LLM capabilities?

25% of most recent YC batch let AI write >95% of their code.

I know software is eating the world, but AI will be writing the software.

@Moneyfolded

25% of most recent YC batch let AI write >95% of their code.

that's because they don't know how to code

Anyway, ai is still far from replacing human coders... far in terms of its capabilities. But not in terms of time. It'll be there within a year or two.

@jim

I'm curious, have you tried the tools I mentioned above in the last month? MCPs?

And do you think YC batch Software engineers are worse than the global average software engineer? Because that's approx what to compare with for this question.

@Moneyfolded I think the bottom 25% of YC founders are so braindead they don't even have the requisite moral agency to be termed "grifters".

Coding agents still just can't reliably do complicated / long time horizon tasks.

But this will change shortly. The time horizon of tasks LLMs can reliably do is supposedly increasing exponentially, roughly 5x-ing every year.

@Moneyfolded oh look this just got published! https://metr.org/hcast.pdf

> we find that current agentssucceed 70-80% of the time on tasks that take humans less than one hour,and less than 20% of the time on tasks that take humans more than 4 hours

@jim interesting read. Thanks!

Seen this one? It's similar to the estimate of 5x/year. Based on this, we're 4 years away from >100x length of tasks. With your data above, those <1h tasks with 70-80% success rate would be 1-3 work weeks.

I think it might become blurry who is a software engineer in a few years? Do they have to at least edit code or read code or something?

@Siebe I was assuming that

Prediction: there will be more software engineers (the kind that write code, e.g. Python or C or JavaScript code) in five years than there are today.

Implies that they have to actually be writing code. Not just "vibe coding" or directing agents or whatever

@jim ah yes, it's pretty clear in the description. I guess I just disagree with how high the market is then

@Siebe I think the figure will be less than 1% of the current number lol

Chollet's take is completely out of touch. The reality is, even today, years after LLM being a thing, most software engineers are glorified copy-paste artists, churning out boilerplate code day in and day out.

When is today?

@FranklinBaldo looks like the market was created 13 March 2024 - I agree, the description or the title should perhaps be updated to make it clear at a glance what the start date was/what "today" refers to

US or globally?

@LucaMasters Globally.

@SanghyeonSeo do you have a source or resolution process in mind?

@Tyler31 My current plan is to ask François Chollet.

Presumably this means full time professional software engineers?

@jim Yes.

The number of CS graduates is climbing very quickly - just the fact that there's a hugely increasing supply of potential SWEs makes me pretty confident that the number of professional SWEs will increason.

How will you measure this?

Don't underestimate the hordes of merely IT-adjacent people from all STEM fields who will be roped into data science and writing throwaway Python/R/MATLAB scripts. I keep being surrounded by those people no matter which company I work for; 5 years seems too early for that trend to revert.

• what is a software engineer?

• across all levels?

• what do u call senior engineers who dont write code but write design docs?

@Seeker

Re: across all levels. YES.

Re: senior engineers who dont write code. As specified, software engineers are "the kind that write code, e.g. Python or C or JavaScript code", so they don't count.

@SanghyeonSeo thanks , yes good description